How I became a dark web consultant to a TV show, and my somewhat complicated relationship with the owner of the most profitable online murder-for-hire service in history

I recently worked as a consultant to CBS for their season premiere of 48 Hours: “Click for a Killer” after I met a CBS producer at the trial of Stephen Allwine for the murder of his wife, Amy. The episode was originally going to be a straightforward telling of that crime, but as they learned about the extent of the Besa Mafia dark web murder-for-hire operation, as well as my own somewhat complicated and ongoing relationship with its owner, Yura, it turned into something quite different.

On Friday I wrote an Opinion piece for The Age based on an earlier blog about why I think Australia’s proposed data retention laws are not only an invasion of privacy, they are an expensive measure that simply won’t work. Today The Age ran a longer journalistic piece about the laws.

This prompted a couple of tweets from the Twitter account that claims to represent the Australian arm of Anonymous:

Tweets by the group claiming to be the Australian arm of Anonymous

This is the same group who claimed responsibility for hacking ASIO earlier this year. Here’s the pastebin dump of ‘targets’ for hacking that they refer to in the tweets above: